Firefox 3.1 Beta Release Schedule Delayed

As reported on ZDNet today, Mozilla has pushed back the beta cycle for the next version of the Firefox browser by a month. The code for beta 1 of version 3.1 of Firefox will freeze on September 30th, and the code freeze for beta 2 will fall on November 4th.

These dates are well behind what Mozilla had initially promised, but Firefox 3.1 has a number of ambitious additions under the hood. Here’s what to expect.

You can find an inventory of planned features for version 3.1 online here. As Mike noted in this post on OStatic, one of the handy new features in version 3.1 will be Ctrl + Tab tab switching, with thumbnails.

Version 3.1 of Firefox will also help the browser catch up to the JavaScript performance that the recently released Google Chrome browser has. And, Firefox 3.1 will wrap in much support for HTML 5–the next generation of HTML. HTML 5 includes many tags and methods for supporting video and audio on web sites, and is predicted by many to start to limit how much resource-hogging Flash is found online.

Mozilla has a running list of top-priority user experience bugs that it is addressing between now and the launch of version 3.1. “These bugs will involve fixing some rough areas of Firefox 3’s UI, landing icons that we meant to land before shipping, and trying to make sure every last pixel is perfect,” says Alex Faaborg, who is keeping up the list.

It looks like we’ll have to wait a little longer for version 3.1, but it should be speedier and provide some efficiency boosts.